have referred at some length to the details of the old United States' tariffs and the incidental controversies of parties, be. canse we shall find here a peculiar development of the political ideas of the North. To all the ingenious philosophy of State rights; to the disquisitions of Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Tyler; to the discnssions of the moral duties of the government, the North had but one invariable reply, and that was the sovereignty of the will of the majority. It recognized no sovereign but numbers, and it was thought to be a sufficient defence of the tariff and other legislation unequal to the South, that it was the work and the will of the majority.

It was during the agitation of the tariff that the consolidation school became firmly established. Mr. Webster, the mouth-piece of the manufacturing interest in the North, attempted by expositions of the Constitution to represent the government as a central organization of numbers, without any feature of originality to distinguish it from other rude democracies of the world. In his attempt to simplify it, he degraded it to the common place of simple democracy, and insulted the wisdom of those who had made it. The political opinions or Mr. Webster were summed up in what he arrogantly called “Four Exhaustive Propositions." These propositions were famous in the newspapers of his day, and may be reproduced here as a very just summary of the political ideas of the North.

MR. WEBSTER'S FOUR EXHAUSTIVE PROPOSITIONS.

1. “That the Constitution of the United States is not a league, confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacity; but a government founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals."

2. “That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations; that nothing can dissolve them but revolution; and that, consequently, there can be no such thing as secession without revolution."

3. “That there is a supreme law, consisting of the Constitntion of the United States, acts of Congress passed in pursuance of it, and treaties; and that in cases not capable of assuming the character of a suit in law or equity, Congrmast judge of, and finally interpret this supreme law, as often as it lias occasion to pass acts of legislation; and in cases capable of assuming the character of a suit, the Supreme Court of the United States is the first interpreter.”

4. “That the attempt by a State to abrogate, annul, or nullify an act of Congress, or to arrest its operation within her limits, on the ground that, in her opinion, such law is uncon. stitutional, is a direct usurpation on the just powers of the general government, and on the equal rights of other States; a plain violation of the Constitution; and a proceeding essen. tially revolutionary in its character and tendency."

It is in the light of these propositions that the present assertion of the independence of the South is denounced by the North as rebellion. And it is with reference to them and their savage doctrine of the power of numbers in a union of sovereign States, that we may in turn challenge the world to declare if the South in this struggle is not enlisted in the cause of free government, which is more important to the world than " the Union,” which has disappeared beneath the wave of history.

In the present war the North has given faithful and constant indications of its dominant idea of the political sovereignty, as well as the military omnipotence of numbers. It is absurd to refer to the person of Abraham Lincoln as the political master of the North; he is the puppet of the vile despotism that rules by brute numbers. We have already referred to some of the characteristics of such despotism. We shall see others in this war, in the timidity and subservient hesitation to which such a government reduces party minorities, and in that destitution of honor which invariably characterizes the many-headed despotism of the people.

Mr. Lincoln was elected on a principle of deadly antagonism to the social order. This party found him subservient to their passions, and with the President in the hollow of their hand, for two years they have reigned triumphantly in the Congress ut at Washington. Such has been the stupendous lunacy and knavery of this body, that it will be regarded in all coming time as a blotch on civilization and a disgrace to the common humanity of the age.

There are some minds in the South which are prejudiced by the impression that the power of the Lincoln party was broken by the fall elections of 1862; that it has lost the majority ou numbers in the North; and that thereby the despotism which we have described as characteristic of the North is rapidly approaching the period of its dissolution or an era of reaction. But this reply to our theory does not take into account all the facts. The Republican party in the North still has the majority of force—a majority more dangerous and appalling than that of numbers, as it finds more numerous objects of revenge among its own people.

The Yankee Congress rejected at the polls has taken fearful revenge on the people who ventured an opinion hostile to the ruling dynasty. They have passed the bank, conscription, and habeas corpus suspension bills, thus placing every life and every dollar, and, indeed, every right of twenty millions of freeborn people at the absolute mercy of Abraham Lincoln. They have abated none of their legislation against the interests of humanity and the written and unwritten law of civilization in this war. They have added to it. They are organizing insurrections in South Carolina ; they have sent a negro army into Florida; they are organizing black regiments in Tennessee But a few months ago the infamous law was passed at Washington known as “the Plunder Act," in which the Secretary of the Treasury was authorized to appoint agents to go South, collect all property, send it North, and have it sold. Iu different parts of the Confederacy the Yankee troops are now destroying all farming implements, seizing all provisions, and preventing the planting of crops, with the avowed deterinination of starving the Southern people into submission. Such a warfare contemplates the exterınination of women and children as well as men, and proposes to inflict a revenge more terrible than the tortures of savages and the modern atrocities of the Sepoys.

It is, perhaps, not greatly to be wondered at that a peopllike the Yankees should show a brutal rage in warfare upoi an enemy who has chastised their insolence and exasperated their pride, and that they should therefore be generally ready to give their adhesion to any train of measures calculated for revenge upon the South. But it is a matter of grave and Bolicitous inquiry that this people should so easily tolerate i neasures in the government which have been plainly airected against their own libertics, and which, while they have been applauding a “vigorous prosecution of the war," have established a savage despotism at home. It is yet more remarkable that the erection of this despotism should be hailed with a certain applause by its own victims. History has some instances of the servile and unnatural joys of a people in the surrender of their liberties; but none grosser than that in which has been inaugurated the throne of Abraham Lincoln at Washington.

There are numerous examples in history where great abilities or some scattered virtues in the character of a despot have won the flattery of minds not ignoble and unconscious of their humiliation. Milton in his Latin superlatives spoke of Cromwell very

much after the same manner in which Mr. Lincoln is spoken of in Yankee vernacular. Eum te agnoscunt omnes, Cromuelle, ea tu civis maximus et gloriosissimus, dux publici consilii, exercitum, fortissimorum imperator, pater patriæ gessisti. But the Western lawyer and tavern-jester is not a Cromwell. No attractions of genius are to be found in the personal composition of Abraham Lincoln. His person in fact is utterly unimportant. He holds the reins for a higher power; and that power is the many-headed monster of Fanaticism, which by numbers or by force constrains the popular will and rules with the rod of iron.

The disposition generally of the Northern people to submit to or tolerate the assaults of the Washington government on their own liberties and the destruction of their civil rights, must proceed from permanent and well-defined causes. We lave already hinted in these pages an explanation of this servile acquiescence in the acts of the government. It is doubtless the fruit of the false political education in the North, that gives none other but materialistic ideas of government, and inculcates the virtue of time-serving with all political majorities. It is to be attributed to the demoralization of the Yan. kee; to the servile habit of his mind; to his long practice of

ubmission to the wild democracy of numbers, -all proceeding from that false idea of government which recognizes it only a the organ of an accidental party, and not as a self-existent principle of right and virtue. It is a melancholy fact that the

people of the North have long ceased to love cr to value lib. erty. They have ceased to esteem the political virtues; to take any account of the moral elements of government; or to look upon it else than as a physical power, to be exercised at the pleasure of a party, and to be endured until reversed by the accident of numbers.

The superficial political education of the people of the North explains much that is curious in their society. Time-serving of power gave them wealth, while it degraded their national character. In the old government they easily surrendered their political virtue for tariffs, bounties, &c.; and the little left of it is readily sacrificed on the devilish altars of this war. Their habit of material computation made them boastful of a "civilization" untouched by the spirits of virtue and humanity, consisting only of the rotten, material things which make up the externals and conveniences of life, and the outer garments of society. Their wealth was blazed out in arts and railroads; comnon schools, the nurseries of an insolent ignorance; and gilded churches, the temples of an impure religion. No people has ever established more decisively the fact of the worthlessness of what remains of "civilization," when the principle of liberty is subtracted, or more forcibly illustrated how much of phos phorescent rottenness there is in such a condition.

"Their much-loved wealth imparts

Convenience, plenty, elegance, and arts;
But view them closer, craft and fraud appear,

Even liberty itself is bartered here;

At gold's superior charms all freedom flies,
The needy sell it and the rich man buys;
A land of tyrants and a den of slaves."

The present war has sufficiently demonstrated the mistake of the North in the measure of its civilization, and convinced the world that much of what it esteemed its former strength was "but plethoric ill." It has done more than this, for it has unmasked the moral nature of the Yankee. It has exposed to the detestation of the world a character which is the product of materialism in politics and materialism in religion-the spawn of the worship of power and the lust of gain. The Yankee--who has followed up an extravagance of bluster by the vilest exhibitions of cowardice-who has falsified his prate